Yearly Archives:

OmniGraffle 1.1, an OS X-only diagramming application built
specifically for Mac OS X, adds editable palettes, document templates, magnetized shapes, a customizable toolbar, multiple information windows, and support for custom shapes. The Omni Group is also extending its MWNY Expo of $60 (from $110; educational price of $35 will remain the same) through the end of this month.

Freeverse Software is looking for individuals willing to help beta test iPuppet Classic Cards, its upcoming card game that lets players insert their own likeness into the game\'s card-playing characters. Potential candidates should have a Mac (preferably with both Mac OS 9 and OS X) or Windows computer, a solid Internet connection, a good understanding of the rules of Bridge, Hearts, Euchre, Setback, and Spades, good communication skills and a basic understanding of computing, and time to devote to the testing process.

REAL Software is now accepting submissions for the REALBasic CD, a compilation of applications, example projects, plug-ins, and more for its popular programming environment. Submissions must be received by Monday, August 6th, and are considered on a first come, first serve basis. Files should be sent to cd@realsoftware.com.

Blizzard Entertainment has announced that its highly anticipated real-time strategy game sequel, WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, will not be ready for release until 2002. The company previously indicated that the game would be released for the PC in late 2001 followed by a Mac release in early 2002, although company officials have been increasingly confident in noting the improved lapse time between their Mac and PC releases (including a simultaneous release of their latest expansion set, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction).

ZDNet\'s Rob Fixmer predicts that media giant AOL Time Warner will inherit the \"evil empire\" mantle from Microsoft for the next era. \"The evil empire is the company that, in any given era, happens to represent a catastrophic threat - sometimes real, often imagined - to civilization as we know it.\" Fixmer cites evidence that Microsoft is now more committed than ever to open standards, while AOL Time Warner is described as \"the biggest, baddest media conglomerate in history,\" \"as rich as God,\" and \"no longer afraid of mixing it up with Microsoft.\"

LightWork Design has released the latest version of its flagship 3D rendering tool, LightWorks 6.0. The new release adds multi-colored area lights, interactive shadows, a new material manager, interactive decal positioning, and a new scenery manager. The company says it is \"responding to an industry trend\" by making the new version Mac OS X compatible. Low-cost evaluations of LightWorks 6.0 are available.

Cameraid 1.2 beta 1 is the latest release of a $15 digital photography utility. The new version sports a Web page and thumbnail generator, is compatibile with most memory card readers, and can use 3rd party serial port/USB port adapters.

Blue World Communications has announced a discount on the upgrade to its forthcoming Lasso Professional 5 Standard Edition product. All customers who purchase new full versions of Lasso Web Data Engine 3.x between now and the release of Lasso Professional 5 Standard Edition will qualify for $200 off the standard price on upgrades to Lasso Professional 5 Standard Edition currently scheduled for availability late Summer 2001.

iPhotoBatch 1.0 is a new $10 batch image processing application that includes support for JPG, GIF, TIF, PCT, BMP and PNG graphic formats. It can handle hundreds of images at a time, and packs an image viewer. [Classic, Carbon]

Total Impact has introduced its \"Centricity\" line of scalable render engines based on PowerPC G4 \"briQs\" which use 20 watts of power, weigh 32 ounces, and are the size of a CD-ROM drive. The company says one comparison showed a 90 frame RIB file rendering took less than one minute on an eight-briQ Centricity system, (each equipped with a 400MHz PowerPC G4 and 3Delight software), while a similar 90 frame animation rendering took 23 hours on a PowerMac G4 733 under OS 9.

Gerry, maker of the alternative ICQ instant messaging client Gerry\'s ICQ, writes in his latest update: \"I was planning on giving out the source code to Gerry\'s ICQ after I had squashed the more obvious bugs in the Carbon version, but without being able to program on MacOS X, it is very difficult for me to figure out what I\'m doing wrong :) So here is my source code.\"

Brian Dunning has posted a Credit Card Validator for FileMaker Pro that checks the authenticity of credit cards without using a script or plug-in. The new calculation is compatible with versions 3, 4, and 5 of FileMaker and is available as a free download.

Afternoon Tech News: Adobe has dropped charges against a 27-year-old Russian programmer who allegedly violated the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act; Palm\'s agreement for porting to ARM processors may enable wrist-watch sized PDAs; America Online is testing a new solution that would allow users of its service to communicate with users of instant messaging protocols from MSN and others.

The Ricoh Corporation, maker of digital cameras and other imaging products, will host the first of three end user forums, \"Ricoh 21... The Source,\" beginning in New York City September 13-14 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Ricoh has scheduled a group of speakers for the general sessions, including Former Vice President Al Gore, Former Senator Bob Dole, Chuck Martin, Chairman and CEO of Net Future Institute and Bob Ostrow, Publisher of PC WORLD Magazine.

Apple, AMD, and NVidia are among the founding members of a new consortium dubbed \"HyperTransport,\" a nonprofit corporation that supports the future development and adoption of AMD\'s HyperTransport I/O Link specification. HyperTransport is a solution that purportedly enables the chips inside of high-performance compute devices, and networking and communications devices to communicate with each other up to 24 times faster compared with existing technologies. \"HyperTransport represents a great technology with exciting future potential,\" said Jon Rubinstein, Apple\'s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

Agere Systems has introduced its ORiNOCO Software Suite for setting up wireless \"Wi-Fi\" networks. ORiNOCO allows users to set of different profiles for the home, office, and other locations, and includes power management features for PowerBooks. The software is compatible with Mac OS 8.6-9.1, and is available as a free download.

SmartDisk, which took home honors at last week\'s Macworld Expo in New York and is an Apple partner, will release financial results for the quarter and six months ended June 30, 2001, at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, on Wednesday, August 1, 2001. A live audio feed of the company\'s results will be available via a Web stream.

As expected, Palm has announced that several suppliers of ARM core-based technology (previously used in Apple\'s Newton) have joined its new Palm OS Ready Program. Intel Corporation and Motorola will produce reference designs, and Texas Instruments Incorporated will develop a wireless processing platform.

easybeat 1.3 adds a global tempo controller view that can be used to define tempo variations over a song to the $90 music software that can compose music, record MIDI instruments, and edit/play up to 16 tracks.

Nullsoft has released Shoutcast 1.8.2, a Carbonized version of the MP3 streaming engine that now offers automatic full server redirection for clusters: \"[it] runs on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 2. It is a unix-style app without an Aqua interface, and has to be run in a terminal window. This server should be considered beta.\"

Napster announced today it has appointed Konrad Hilbers to be the company\'s new Chief Executive Officer. He succeeds Hank Barry, who will remain on Napster\'s Board of Directors. Hilbers\' first task will be to oversee the launch of Napster\'s new membership-based service later this summer. He previously steered AOL, Netscape and Compuserve brands in Europe.

Yesterday we reported that Village Tronic plans to be the only provider of Trident graphics chips for Macs. We also noted demo versions of Tony Hawk 2 and American McGee\'s Alice, a study showing that nearly 30 percent of scientists use Macs, a new USB 2.0 Host Controller, an update to Mac OS X\'s Web Sharing component, and a new beta of McAfee\'s Virex for OS X. There\'s also a recap of our Macworld Expo NY coverage.

c|net\'s News.com has posted an article summarizing Ballmer\'s speech on .NET at the Internet Summit. Scott McNealy, another speaker at the conference, remains unimpressed by Microsoft, and McNealy criticized Microsoft by reminding his audience that \"with Microsoft, the first hit is always free -- remember that all your life.\"

Now AAPL Stock: 113.95 ( + 1.83 )

Cirrus creates Lightning-headphone dev kit

Apple supplier Cirrus Logic has introduced a MFi-compliant new development kit for companies interested in using Cirrus' chips to create Lightning-based headphones, which -- regardless of whether rumors about Apple dropping the analog headphone jack in its iPhone this fall -- can offer advantages to music-loving iOS device users. The kit mentions some of the advantages of an all-digital headset or headphone connector, including higher-bitrate support, a more customizable experience, and support for power and data transfer into headphone hardware. Several companies already make Lightning headphones, and Apple has supported the concept since June 2014. http://bit.ly/29giiZj

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Developer163d

Apple Store app offers Procreate Pocket

The Apple Store app for iPhone, which periodically rewards users with free app gifts, is now offering the iPhone "Pocket" version of drawing app Procreate for those who have the free Apple Store app until July 28. Users who have redeemed the offer by navigating to the "Stores" tab of the app and swiping past the "iPhone Upgrade Program" banner to the "Procreate" banner have noted that only the limited Pocket (iPhone) version of the app is available free, even if the Apple Store app is installed and the offer redeemed on an iPad. The Pocket version currently sells for $3 on the iOS App Store. [32.4MB]

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Porsche adds CarPlay to 2017 Panamera

Porsche has added a fifth model of vehicle to its CarPlay-supported lineup, announcing that the 2017 Panamera -- which will arrive in the US in January -- will include Apple's infotainment technology, and be seen on a giant 12.3-inch touchscreen as part of an all-new Porsche Communication Management system. The luxury sedan starts at $99,900 for the 4S model, and scales up to the Panamera Turbo, which sells for $146,900. Other vehicles that currently support CarPlay include the 2016 911 and the 2017 models of Macan, 718 Boxster, and 718 Cayman. The company did not mention support for Google's corresponding Android Auto in its announcement. http://bit.ly/295ZQ94

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Industry163d

Apple employees testing wheelchair features

New features included in the forthcoming watchOS 3 are being tested by Apple retail store employees, including a new activity-tracking feature that has been designed with wheelchair users in mind. The move is slightly unusual in that, while retail employees have previously been used to test pre-release versions of OS X and iOS, this marks the first time they've been included in the otherwise developer-only watchOS betas. The company is said to have gone to great lengths to modify the activity tracker for wheelchair users, including changing the "time to stand" notification to "time to roll" and including two wheelchair-centric workout apps. http://bit.ly/2955JDa

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Troubleshooting163d

SanDisk reveals two 256GB microSDXC cards

SanDisk has introduced two 256GB microSDXC cards. Arriving in August for $150, the Ultra microSDXC UHS-I Premium Edition card offers transfer speeds of up to 95MB/s for reading data. The Extreme microSDXC UHS-I card can read at a fast 100MB/s and write at up to 90MB/s, and will be shipping sometime in the fourth quarter for $200. http://bit.ly/294Q1If

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Upgrades/storage163d

Apple's third-quarter results due July 26

Apple has advised it will be issuing its third-quarter results on July 26, with a conference call to answer investor and analyst queries about the earnings set to take place later that day. The stream of the call will go live at 2pm PT (5pm ET) via Apple's investor site, with the results themselves expected to be released roughly 30 minutes before the call commences. Apple's guidance for the quarter put revenue at between $41 billion and $43 billion. http://apple.co/1oi1Pbm

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Investor164d

Twitter stickers slowly roll out to users

Twitter has introduced "stickers," allowing users to add extra graphical elements to their photos before uploading them to the micro-blogging service. A library of hundreds of accessories, props, and emoji will be available to use as stickers, which can be resized, rotated, and placed anywhere on the photograph. Images with stickers will also become searchable with viewers able to select a sticker to see how others use the same graphic in their own posts. Twitter advises stickers will be rolling out to users over the next few weeks, and will work on both the mobile apps and through the browser. http://bit.ly/29bbwUE